I've finished the first pass of rebalancing the lasers and the energies and am halfway done with a new combined pulse gun + mag cannon + pulseshotgun sheet. I've had a lot of constructive comments on the laser's and am still working on them, so please don't take any stats that you see on test as the final point.
I would like to make two points that perhaps I did not communicate properly already. First, a big reason for changing the stats and coming up with new balance formulas for everything is not just because the existing balance of things is pretty bad, but it's also so that we can more easily move forward. Most tech 20 items are about 50% - 100% more powerful than other items just a couple tech levels below in the current game. I am making a much more gradual and even power curve so that we can add tech 21 and more over time without breaking old content by following the existing curve.
The second point that I would like to make is that while I am trying to keep the basic nature of all items as close to possible to what they currently are, I am literally changing the stats on every item in the game. So it makes no sense to go on test server and say something like "My energy bank has gone from X to Y, I'm nerfed so badly, etc etc." What will matter is all of the stats relative to each other once the new numbers start to settle in and we become happy with them. Plus, the Damage Per Energy (DPE) of all the weapons is going up significantly. None of this is going live until we are happy with the new stats, and we will be taking all of your suggestions and opinions once we have at least the first pass of all the new stats up on test.
I would also like to take the chance to talk about some of the formulas I am redoing so that you guys can have some insight to what exactly is going on here.
The existing items have a very vague noting of how much "power" per tech level they should be, but most items that people actually use are totally deviated from the old power formulas because various devs adding items didn't agree with the old power formulas so just made items that seemed right. But this gave us things like the DS and other totally unbalanced ships and items. So I have a new formula that will strictly give a baseline power for each item based on the tech level. This power is then modified by a size class, a weight class, the acquire difficulty, and other things like if the item is neuro-bound, hull class bound, or has a skill requirement.
I would like to start adding new higher-level content with each uni, and I think a fun way of doing that is to add new, more difficult enemies and 1 new attainable tech level and new items of that level. Because I would like to, in theory, expand the maximum tech and therefore power of items indefinitely, I wanted to make a power curve with diminishing returns. By that, I mean that each successive level adds less power, percentage-wise, than the previous level. Diminishing returns for increased cost also creates a natural game balance, as people will get the skills up to the point where it's worth it to them to keep getting the skills.
The currently formula that I'm working off of is that if a tech 0 item has a relative power of 1.0, then the power P of an item of tech T will be P(T) = 1.0 + 0.20T. This means that an item of tech 1 will be 20% more powerful than an item of tech 0 and an item of tech 20 will be 4.2% more powerful than an item of tech 19, and, if you consider the power of a ship with all items of a certain tech to be roughly the cube of the power of the individual items, then a ship of tech level 1 will be 73% more powerful than a ship with tech level 0 and a ship of tech level 20 will be 13% more powerful than a ship with tech level 19. Also, a ship with all common level 20 equipment will be 125x as powerful as a ship with all common tech 0 equipment. But since a person with tech 20 skills will likely have mostly DG loot, mission rewards, and built items, they will probably be more like 216x as powerful as a ship with all tech 0 equipment.
Since the old power curve looked more like an exponential graph and the new power curve looks like a line, the low-mid level equipment is getting quite a beef. This will apply to players and AI's alike, so will hopefully be close to a wash in terms of difficulty of doing content, but we will have to playtest and adjust AI's to make sure. I am trying to make it so high-level content will be roughly as easy/hard as it currently is, with new, higher-level enemies to be added that will be involved with players getting tech 21 skills.
And for your amusement, here's an animated GIF banner I made yesterday to go up against the new flash banners:
